Children. I Work With Children (Part 1)

(Game date: 9/10/2020)

The most important thing any group needs is funding.  Some may argue that point, until they need something.

Mauger wants to peddle drugs.  Not really my cup of tea, but if we can avoid killing anyone with it then fine, it's not like the government puts any real effort into keeping it off the streets.  All it really requires of me is an untraceable dead drop interface and some throwaway BANlink contacts.  I can do that in my sleep.  The real danger comes from the street gangs protecting their turf.

I have another idea.

Since the kid, Ryatt, helped me with the TekKnights hack, I've promised him a couple of favors, and I don't like owing anyone anything.  Can't really describe the feeling -- kind of like a security flag was sprung, but no alarms went off, but you just know they will?  So I looked into his reason for invading the TK servers.

Turns out they had a Cease & Desist letter in there, from the SiNet corp, telling Ryatt to stop giving away his own games!  

Backstory:  For quite some time now, this self-taught coder has been creating amusing games and, not needing any extra income, has been basically just releasing them on the 'nets for anyone to use.  One company, SimSoft, has been bundling them and reselling them, giving no part of that income to Ryatt, but not changing them in any way either.  Another company, SiNet, has been outright lifting his code and dropping it into their own games, renamed but otherwise it's all his work.  It's this company, SiNet, that wants to shut Ryatt down.  

And here's their C&D letter, unserved, still sitting on the TK server.  Well, not anymore; we stole it.  What mischief could we possibly do with that?  And more importantly, how could it profit us?

A plan started forming.  A basic man-in-the-middle con at first, but it grew.

Plan A: Steal the lawsuit.

I altered the C&D letter, directing it instead at SimSoft.  This should go over so easily that I find it hard to believe that SiNet didn't do it in the first place.  I mean, what do they get out of shutting Ryatt down?  He stops giving away some games, he learns to protect his future work better.  Essentially, they kill the golden goose.  But SimSoft?  They have seizable assets, and are provably making money from property that SiNet claims to own.  And SimSoft can't defend themselves without admitting that they stole the games too.  They'll have to settle, and we watch the progress of the lawsuit closely, ready to hijack whatever settlement gets transferred.

But we don't stop there.

Plan B:  Bait a bigger trap.

For this we need another cooperative ally, which the Tenner Hut fiasco has already provided: EllieRocks, the other pint-sized victim of authority on that fateful night.  

EllieRocks will announce, at a time we determine, that she wants a fan to design a video game based upon her concert videos.  Something that has the player singing, and dancing, in her style, and gaining points based upon how well they perform.  Ryatt, of course, will have been working on this game ahead of time, so she only makes this announcement when he is in the final stages.  His version, however, will also contain a very sophisticated tracker code, which will send a silent alert when it is uploaded to any server other than his own.  The alert contains the time and place of the upload, and it is sent back to Ryatt, to Zeke, and to a legal service that we will retain.  Of course, his pre-work is kept in a sandbox until the announcement is made.

When SiNet takes the bait (it really isn't a matter of "if"), we drop the lawsuit of the century on them.  I hope (seriously believe) that he wins enough to cripple the company, and start his own -- and thereby provide a constant revenue stream to the Peaches Initiative, as well.  

The first step of Plan A is away, and bots in place to watch the docket (the gears of the legal machine grind slowly).  A week later, Ryatt's already half done with the basic game mechanics, and then EllieRocks hit us with a different project request.

(continued in part 2)